June 2009 – Page 2 – Illicit Cultural Property

Asif Efrat on International Antiquities Law

Asif Efrat, Visiting Professor at Cornell has posted a paper, Protecting against Plunder: The United States and the International Efforts against Looting of Antiquities

In 1970 UNESCO adopted a convention intended to stem the flow of looted antiquities from developing countries to collections in art-importing countries. The majority of art-importing countries, including Britain, Germany, and Japan, refused to join the Convention. Contrary to other art-importing countries, and reversing its own traditionally-liberal policy, the United States accepted the international regulation of antiquities and joined the UNESCO Convention. The article seeks to explain why the United States chose to establish controls on antiquities, to the benefit of foreign countries facing archaeological plunder and to the detriment of the US art market. I argue that the concern of US policymakers about looting abroad resulted from a series of scandals which exposed the involvement of American museums and collectors with looted material. Advocacy efforts of American archaeologists also played a key role in educating policymakers about the loss of historical knowledge caused by looting and the necessity of regulation. The article further analyzes how antiquities dealers and certain museums lobbied Congress against implementing the UNESCO Convention and why Congress decided in favor of implementation as an act of international moral leadership. Following the analysis of the Congressional battle, I examine how the US debate over looted antiquities has evolved to the present. The article concludes with implications for the role of values versus interests in international law.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

These things are three-times cursed

That’s what Joseph Sisto said to his father with respect to the 3,500 objects in the elder Sisto’s Illinois home according to Rosalind Bentley in a piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Sunday.

These things are three-times cursed, Sisto, of Duluth, would tell his father, John. Cursed once because they were stolen, cursed twice because they were smuggled, and cursed thrice because concealing the cache in their home had robbed the family of its peace of mind.

And there are more details on how the objects came from Italy to the United States. I think one curious thing to pick up on here, are all the crates of antiquities and other objects which were shipped from Italy. Customs agents in both the United States and Italy were unable to detect these objects which were certainly illegally exported, and some were perhaps stolen. I’m left wondering how many crates of objects are still being shipped which are undetected. And I don’t think its a case of authorities not taking this problem seriously, or a lack of legal restrictions; rather I think there are limits to what we can reasonably expect of law enforcement and customs agents.

Collectibles and old texts fascinated the elder Sisto. By the time Joseph was an adolescent, his father was taking him on regular trips to Italy to visit family. The trips were often more drudgery for Joseph than pleasure. Italian summers were interminably hot, and Joseph and his dad would spend hours looking for rare books and manuscripts in musty old castles and homes in the country. Often, his father would either leave with purchased packages or he’d wind up buying the entire contents of the place.

Months after the Italian visits, crates would arrive at the brick bungalow in Berwyn. Scores of crates, almost never just one or two. That’s when the real work began. Joseph, his younger brother and his father would spend every minute of their spare time unloading dirty, messy crates. Instead of playing softball outside with friends or just hanging out, Joseph and his brother had to stay inside and catalogue the contents. But instead of selling the items on the black market (which the FBI said had been part of an original plan), John Sisto kept almost everything.

He converted the second floor of the bungalow into a veritable archive. He had dozens of bookshelves installed. He filled the attic. Then he learned how to read and translate Latin to better appreciate what was in his trove. He quietly and cautiously sought out curators to learn how to properly preserve ancient documents, always taking his absolute worst and most insignificant piece for the consultation so as not to arouse suspicion, Sisto said.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Greece Not Interested in Sharing the Marbles

Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaras has said his nation is not interested in working out a loan arrangement for the Parthenon Marbles.

I can certainly understand that point of view, but at some point don’t we need to move beyond the question of whether that taking in 1801-2 was wrongful; and start asking what is best for the marbles and those who want to learn from them today? I don’t want to belabor the point, but isn’t the fact that the marbles are still on display at the British Museum a pretty strong indication that their removal was legal, or if not, not subject to current judicial scrutiny? We can argue about whether their continued display in London is ethical, but not I do not think a legal question any longer.

From the BBC:

The government, as any other Greek government would have done in its place, is obliged to turn down the offer,” Mr Samaras said, in a statement.

“This is because accepting it would legalise the snatching of the Marbles and the monument’s carving-up 207 years ago.”

He added that he was prepared to discuss lending Greek antiquities to the British Museum “to fill the gap left when the (Parthenon) Marbles finally return to the place they belong”.

Mr Samaras was responding to comments made by British Museum spokeswoman, Hannah Boulton, on Greek radio.

She said under existing British Museum policy the museum would consider loan requests by any foreign government, including Greece.

But all requests would be considered on a case-to-case basis, taking many factors into consideration, including fitness of the item or items to travel.

Greece would also have to recognise the museum’s ownership rights to the sculptures, which is a loan condition.

Ms Boulton told the BBC that the British Museum had not received a request from Greece, nor had it offered the marbles for loan.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Looted Objects Returned to Afghanistan

The BBC reports on the return of 1,500 objects which were seized by customs agents at Heathrow airport. A great deal of attention was given to the looting of the Baghdad Museum and other sites in Iraq. But are we ignoring the problems in Afghanistan? This may be only a fraction of the objects which are escaping its borders.

More than 1,500 artefacts were recovered in an 11-day operation. Many are priceless objects of Islamic art looted in illegal excavations.

They include a magnificent tall bronze bird. Nine-hundred years ago, its owner would have burned incense in the drawer that slots into its puffed chest.

“We are really happy to have our objects back,” says Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, who has been preparing descriptions of the recovered treasures in the Dari language for the display cabinets.

There are prehistoric tools – up to 6,000 years old – and ancient coins, as well as more recent Islamic tiles, inscribed basins and bronze candlesticks.

“We wish all the countries around the world – if they have our collections – would transfer them back to our country too,” Mr Rahimi says.

During Afghanistan’s civil war, Kabul museum was on the front line. Used as a base by the Mujahedin, the building was badly damaged. But most devastating of all – 70% of its rich collection was systematically looted and smuggled abroad.

Much of what survived was then smashed to bits by the Taliban.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

More on the Four Corners Indictments

The LA Times has more on the 24 indictments unsealed yesterday by federal authorities. The individuals were charged both under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. The press release is here, which has the names of the defendants, and some of the arrest warrants. I find it noteworthy for at least two reasons.

First, this seems to be the familiar problem with heritage preservation just about anywhere in the world—helping local residents understand the importance of preserving objects—and not removing them. In the case of thisarea, there are artifacts, pots, baskets, textiles, axe-heads and other objects often are well-preserved by the dry air, and in some cases aren’t even buried. I think these arrests are a welcome development, but they aren’t going to be the best or only solution. These extensive criminal investigations help raise the profile of the problem, but as I’ve argued elsewhere; they aren’t a solution. These elaborate criminal investigations are expensive, and require a great deal of resources. I’m not sure either that we can guarantee that these will continue. I’d like to see these arrests followed by some outreach explaining to the residents of these and other rural communities why these objects need to remain where they are, so they can be preserved for future generations.

Most of those indicted were residents of Blanding, Utah, which according to wikipedia has the benefit of nearby monuments such as the Natural Bridges National Monument, Monument Valley and the Four Corners area, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (Lake Powell), Cedar Mesa archaeological and wilderness area, the San Juan River including Goosenecks State Park, and the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. It is located approximately 1 hour south of the popular recreation hub, Moab, and Arches National Park.

As the piece in the LAT notes:

Southwest residents have been scooping up artifacts for generations. Since the early 20th century, settlers were even encouraged to dig up arrowheads, pottery and other remains. In the 1920s the University of Utah paid Blanding residents $2 per ancient pot.

Federal authorities estimate that 90% of the 20,000 archaeological sites in San Juan County, where Blanding is located, have been plundered.

According to a search warrant affidavit, the FBI and Bureau of Land Management in October 2006 developed “a major dealer of archaeological artifacts” as a source who would help them unravel the informal network of pot hunters profiting off the land’s history. Authorities wired the dealer to record the transactions.

Second, the Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazer was at the news conference, in what seems to be a high-profile attempt to highlight how seriously federal authorities are taking the looting of Native American sites. These charges arose as part of a two-year investigation. This indicates a dramatic departure from one of the final acts of the Bush administration, which was to pardon a Utah man for stealing objects from Native American territory.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

"You really shouldn’t own the Mona Lisa"

All things considered today has a terrific interview with Joseph Sisto, the son of John Sisto—the man whose private collection of antiquities, books and documents was subject to an FBI investigation resulting in 1,600 objects being returned to Italy. As I wrote earlier this week, this was a staggering number of objects in the hands of one private collection. And clearly the decision by the son to bring in the authorities after his father’s death has created some tension in the family.

As the younger Sisto says in the piece “Throughout the late 1960s and early ’70s, he went back and forth buying estates and castles — the contents of those estates — in Italy, and then shipping them back here to the United States,” he remembers that “[a]t some point, you could barely move in the house.” It seems the elder Sisto was self-taught, teaching himself ancient Latin and script Latin.

The younger Sisto soon realized that many of these objects had been illegally removed from Italy when he learned about the UNESCO Convention, and cultural property law while earning a degree in cultural anthropology.

The story presents a sharp contrast I think, in the attitudes of th elder Sisto who clearly thought he was conducting good research, translating thousands of these ancient documents. However his work, and his collection of objects must surely have violated Italian law. But why was nobody missing all of these documents? Were they really stolen, or instead purchased and illegally exported? What will happen to these ancient documents. I expect historians an dothers will be able to make great use of these documents, something that I don’t think they could have done had the documents remained in private hands.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

24 Indicted for Looting in the 4 Corners

A staggering 24 indictments are being announced as we speak for looting Native American sites in the Southwest. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

An ongoing federal investigation of archaeological-site looting in the West has moved into Utah, where federal authorities are expected to visit later today to announce a slew of criminal charges.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Bureau of Indian Affairs boss Larry EchoHawk, U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman and officials from the FBI and Justice Department plan an afternoon news conference in Salt Lake City to detail the charges netted after a two-year undercover probe in southeastern Utah.

The charges stem from the theft of cultural and historical artifacts from American Indian lands and federal tracts in the Four Corners area, according to the Interior Department.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Inspiration, Fairey and George Orwell

“[I]t wasn’t created to say that you can’t be inspired “

So says Shepard Fairey in discussing Copyrights in an interview with Justin Shady of the Onion AV Club:

The A.V. Club: You’ve used photo references throughout your career, even going back to the André The Giant image that became your signature. But the Obama “Hope” poster sparked a legal battle between you and the Associated Press. Where’s the line between intellectual property and creative expression?

Shepard Fairey: The most important thing about intellectual property vs. creative expression is that copyright law was created not to stifle creativity, but to encourage creativity. The idea behind copyrighting was that if you made something, a piece of music or art or a product, someone cannot make an exact facsimile or replica of it, because that would hurt your ability to sell the exact same thing. But it wasn’t created to say that you can’t be inspired by something and make an evolution of that, something that transforms it. A lot of classical music or even aspects of the Declaration Of Independence are all borrowed from works that came before them. Now, there’d be lawsuits over all this stuff, but the common sense was that you build on ideas. If what you build doesn’t compete on the market for the thing that inspired it, then everyone wins.

And that’s the way I look at this Obama image. First of all, the AP is showing the wrong photo. I’d found this image of George Clooney and Obama at this Darfur panel, and I thought, “That’s kind of the right look for Obama.” When I saw the one they had, I thought they’d just cropped in on the same photo, but I realized it was taken either a split second before or a split second after. It’s interesting how once you have my poster and everyone knows it as a reference, everyone wants to work backward and find the source. But the source was completely irrelevant to the final cause, because Obama wasn’t even running for president yet when that was happening. It was a news photo. What I created was clearly a presidential poster—new colors, new slogan, totally stylized and idealized, and it doesn’t compete with the original.

That makes good sense I think, and whatever you think of Fairey, I think he does have a point that so much of what is created owes a debt to what has come before; and overly restrictive copyright regimes thwart that creation. For another example, Paul Owen in the Guardian recently argued George Orwell’s 1984 owes much of its “plot, characters and conclusion” to a work by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We”. He reviewed the work in 1946, three years before he published 1984. But as Owen argues:

So does it matter that Orwell borrowed plot and characters from the earlier book? After all, it seems clear that he made a superior work of literature out of them. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s importance comes not so much from its plot as from its immense cultural impact, which was recognised almost immediately when it won the £357 Partisan Review prize for that year’s most significant contribution to literature, and which has continued to this day. Most of the aspects and ideas of the novel that still resonate so strongly in political life are his own: newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the Thought Police, Room 101; the extreme use of propaganda, censorship and surveillance; the rewriting of history; labels and slogans that mean the opposite of what they say; the role for Britain implied in the name Airstrip One.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Picasso Sketchbook Stolen in Paris

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More evidence that Picasso is a favorite among art thieves. A sketchbook containing 33 drawing by Pablo Picasso was stolen from the Picasso Museum in Paris. The theft was discovered this afternoon. It is believed that the book was held in an unlocked (!) display case on the first floor of the museum. There are not many details at this point, but I wonder if perhaps a visitor walked off with it? Or it may have been an after-hours break-in.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

1,600 Objects Bound for Italy

There were some terrific images released yesterday at the FBI press conference announcing the return of 1,600 objects found in John Sisto’s home when he died in 2007. He had amassed thousands of documents and objects, all stored in his Berwyn, Illinois home.

Of the 3,500 objects found in Sisto’s home when he died in 2007, the FBI has determined that 1,600 of them were stolen or illegally exported from Italy and must be returned. Despite the estimated value of the objects, perhaps as much as $10 million, there will be no prosecution in Illinois, though perhaps some Italian prosecutions may take place. The staggering fact is the owners of the nearly 2,000 other objects is unknown, and will be returned to the family.

Among the items to be returned are religious relics, manuscripts written by Mussolini, figurines from the 4th Century B.C., letters written by popes, and other objects.

In a Chicago Tribune piece by Margaret Ramirez and Robert Mitchum, they note these objects had become a point of contention with Sisto’s son:

In the mid-2000s, Joseph Sisto learned that many of the items were likely illegal and confronted his father, telling them that the artifacts should be returned to Italy.

But his father refused, provoking a family dispute that separated him from his father during the final years of his life, he said.

When his father died, Joseph Sisto asked Berwyn police to enter the home with him, knowing that the thousands of artifacts would need to be investigated by authorities.

Berwyn Police Chief William Kushner recalled the incredible sight when he first entered the home in 2007. Kushner said the house was filled with hundreds of boxes, many piled 5 feet high and all labeled in Italian. Upstairs and in the attic, precious paintings covered the walls, protected by large sheets of cardboard refrigerator boxes. Immediately, Kushner knew he had to call the FBI art crimes unit. He ordered his officers not to touch anything.

The FBI believes many of the objects were taken from the Bari region of Italy, where John Sisto was born. Paul Barford wonders if perhaps this may become an increasing trend if “many children of today’s no-questions-asked accumulators of archaeological artefacts (not to mention dealers) will be faced with similar dilemmas.” One can’t help but see parallels with the sale of William Kingsland’s art collection, who died in 2006, and it was revealed that many of the works found in his home had been stolen.

One wonders as well how he came to acquire these objects; as surely Sisto didn’t steal all of these objects himself. Why was it possible for him to acquire them. The FBI speculates that the objects may have been shipped to the U.S. between 1960 and 1982 by Sisto’s father, who was still living in Italy. Perhaps the objects were taken from private collections or elsewhere.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com